The Texas Water Development Board will provide $46 million in bonds to the Upper Trinity Regional Water District to double the capacity of a water treatment plant that serves the booming communities near U.S. Highway 380 in eastern Denton County.

“This provides financial assistance to expand the Riverbend Water Reclamation Plant,” said Thomas E. Taylor, executive director of the Upper Trinity water district. “It will allow us to double the present [treatment] capacity of 2 million gallons a day and will enable us to have adequate capacity for the next three to five years.”

That provides room to grow in places like Aubrey, Paloma Creek, Providence Village and Savannah, Taylor said. One new development, Hillwood Communities’ 2,400-home Union Park in Little Elm, has already contracted with the water district to provide treated effluent for its landscaping needs.

“This is high-class, high-quality treated effluent, but it’s cheaper and more efficient than using drinking water,” Taylor said. “It’s perfect for landscaping.”

The treatment plant serves communities on both sides of the U.S. 380 corridor, Taylor said, but most of the development will be north of the highway.

The state will sell the bonds for the water district, and the district will save some money in the process, he said. The funding should be in place around August.

“That’s when the project will really get underway, the design work, and we’ll go to construction early next year,” Taylor said. “It will take about 18 months from the start of construction.”

The Riverbend project will begin about when work on the new Doe Branch Water Reclamation Plant is completed, he said.

And it’s possible that when the Riverbend expansion is complete, another district water reclamation plant will be ready to grow.

“Especially on the wastewater side, we don’t build huge chunks of capacity,” Taylor said, in part because expanding existing plants doesn’t take nearly as long as adding to the raw water supply.

The district’s Lake Ralph Hall project in Fannin County, for example, was proposed in 1989. The district still doesn’t have final approval to build it.